ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the classicising of crisis itself — the classicising of the very idea of regime change or revolution — by tracing the classicising concept of novae res or ‘innovation’ which was a common trope in the understanding of politics in early modern England. It first outlines the remarkably consistent Roman usage of novae res, and then shows that this strongly pejorative Roman discourse conditioned early modern conceptions of revolutionary ‘innovation’, making it almost impossible to imagine a revolution actually succeeding. The chapter analyses the significance of the revolutionary sense of ‘innovation’, a pervasive term in early seventeenth-century religious and political debate, for the understanding of political culture in the years before the civil war. Tracing the usage of the apparently conservative, pejorative notion of ‘innovation’ thus takes us much further into the genesis of the English revolution than one might expect.
